Mariel Capanna
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1988
United States
Adams and Ollman
With all of my paintings, I’m asking: when strung together, can a series of incomplete views, clunky translations, misremembered moments, flattened experiences, and oversimplifications yield something new that’s still meaningful in its own right?
–Mariel Capanna
Mariel Capanna, Fruit Cart, Wagon Wheels, Streamers, Stool, 2022, oil, chalk, and wax on panel, 56h x 52w, in 142.24h x 132.08w cm
Mariel Capanna explores the subtle relationships between memory, place, and perception through performative, reflexive painting. Working from direct observation of films, documentaries, and other moving imagery, Capanna indexes filmic moments using quick painterly marks and gestures, capturing fleeting images as they move on and off-screen and into the past.
The works on view, all 2022, were made while the artist watched documentation of festivals, parades, and other public celebrations. The paintings, rendered in a luminous palette of pale blues, pinks and yellows, take cu ...
In conversation:
Mariel Capanna and Stella Zhong,
May 2022
Stella Zhong: Taking objects from movies and pictures, do the stories remain with the objects you pick out? Does a painting become a collage of multiple parallel and intersecting narratives, which only you would probably know? Are they your secrets?
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Mariel Capanna: My painting practice involves accepting that I am, as you put it, “always only seeing the partial picture;” accepting that if I’m focusing on one thing, then I’m necessarily failing to see everything else—or at least failing to see everything else in any kind of detail. My painting practice also involves accepting that I’m always only partially remembering that partially seen picture. The cartoonish quality that you identified is mostly the result of the limitations of my memory. When I’m watching a video I’ll see a pale blue bicycle and I’ll remind myself: “pale blue bicycle, pale blue bicycle”—but then when I reach out to paint it I’ll hardly remember the proper shape of a bicycle so I’m forced to simplify it. Or I’ll see a beautiful boot with a bit of sock sticking out and I’ll think “brown boot with yellow striped sock, brown boot with yellow striped sock” and then that’s what I’ll paint, but it will certainly have lost the particular charm and character of the brown boot that I first noticed and cared to paint. That can be dissatisfying in the moment—I’m often disappointed by or critical of that cartoonish quality—but then that brown boot in its simplified form will, in my painting, form some surprising relationship with, say, the simplified shape of the pale blue bicycle, and then I no longer crave for my painted brown boot to be a faithful rendering of that original idiosyncratic brown boot. With all of my paintings, I’m asking: when strung together, can a series of incomplete views, clunky translations, misremembered moments, flattened experiences, and oversimplifications yield something new that’s still meaningful in its own right?
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SZ: Here's an annoying question for you: when do you know when a work is done!? Not something that I am particularly concerned with but curious if it's on your mind.
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MC: When is a work done? I like that for you, distance, mystery, and a feeling of unknown are the signals. I tend to call a painting done when every mark and every zone has a role in relationship to all the others; when no part of the painting feels stranded, idle, isolated. Sometimes I aim to make a very sparse painting, and when it’s almost feeling finished I make a mark that throws everything off. Then I then need to make forty-two more moves in order for everything to work and by that point it’s a very cluttered painting and that’s just what it has to be. My paintings are additive and cumulative, and it’s difficult for me to remove things or edit back. Rewinding isn’t an option. So if I want a painting with ample negative space or open space, I need to build it up very cautiously.
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Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. She has been an artist in residence at the Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology Residency in Michoacan, MX; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; and at the Tacony Library and Arts Building (LAB, Philadelphia, PA. Capanna has also been the recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship and an Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. She is currently the Mellon Post-MFA Fellow in Studio Art at Williams College, Williamstown, MA.